"Derrick Austin wields a variety of figurative devices, modes of address, and rhetorical stances. His strongest imagery does not startle, but confirms our sense of the rightness of things . . . Precise and focused, Austin's language often seems ekphrastic, as though he had a picture in front of him as he writes. In a few of the poems, he clearly does, but it is his voice and vision, not his method, that are ekphrastic." --Harvard Review

"Austin's remarkable debut collection opens with a quote from John 5:4-6 . . . foreshadowing how water, religion/spirituality, and body focus become vehicles to explore being black, homosexual, male, and a human being in a troubling century. 'San Souci' epitomizes the sophistication of form and thought in Austin's poetry by using an effect resembling Versailles' Hall of Mirrors as the poem's speaker reflects on paintings, how they reflect life, his body, his lover's body, how he can see his lover as a painting or see the act of pleasuring another artfully reflected back to him. Whether encountering European catacombs or the Gulf Coast's post-oil-spill devastation, all of Austin's lyrical poems are poignant and empowered." --Booklist, *Starred*

"This collection is well-suited to readers prepared interrogate what they love and what they distrust. In Austin's hands, the exquisite can be ominous while the grotesque can turn charming, and his poems wisely assert that the world is unforgiving and yet full of mercy--that one can question beauty and yet still be beholden to it." --Publishers Weekly

"Trouble the Water is an auspicious debut, a deep and resonant volume which nurses wonder in the face of sorrow and anger, wonder in the presence of loss. Here we follow a speaker who proclaims early on, "my heart swims/ in gladness at the changeable world." I want to keep these words as a credo, recite them often. I want to receive the world this way every day." --The Rumpus

"Derrick Austin's stunning debut, Trouble the Water, gives readers unique insight on what it means to be a queer, black man in today's world. He navigates the complicated worlds of race, sexuality, and religion with such fearlessness that we as readers can't turn away even if we wanted to. . . . Austin is an important voice in poetry. His book comes at a time when it is becoming more and more difficult to ignore the social injustices these communities face. Trouble the Water is not just the title of Austin's book; it is a command. The only question now is whether or not we will listen." --PANK Magazine

"Part pastoral, part ekphrasis, part witness, part eco-poetics, part queer pop culture--it is too easy to say that Austin's poems live inside the elastic tension between high and low art, between religious devotion and queer desire; it is too easy to say that Austin contains multitudes. At times, Trouble the Water reads like four definitive chapbook-length projects, but it is his insistence throughout the book on art's ability to reveal rather than salve, his insistence on the corporal holiness of the body, even (especially) a queer body, in a socially puritanical world